If what you crave is a Lord of the Rings sequel featuring a sight gag wizard with bird poop in his hair who rides a rabbit sleigh, orcs (or like creatures) who deliver one-liners after being disemboweled, humorous beheading sequences played for cheap laughs, extended dish-cleaning footage, and lots of fight-scene ideas lifted straight out of Pirates of the Caribbean...this is your movie.

Honestly, though, it was enjoyable enough. Not worth seeing twice (unless the sequels rock muh socks, in which case I could see doing the "let's just watch the set" thing next time my wife is pregnant and ruined), and not up to the standards of the previous trilogy, but not a Phantom Menace or Crystal Skull level destructive. Just cornier and plodding. If you view the original trilogy as THE story, and this movie as ancillary or bonus material, it's fine. If you try to think of it as an equal part of the telling of the story, the comparison hurts it.

Bonus: one of the two very bored guys sitting in front of me offered the following thought as the credits rolled: "Shit, white people is weird." The more I think on it, the more this summarizes Lord of the Rings entirely. And maybe Tom Cruise, too.

See, to me, that's what I think TH should have been: a smaller, more humble film with some Celtic flavour and a few bumbling hobbits. Like the book. It's less epic mythology and more smaller fairytale, if I remember rightly. But it won't be that, because it's going to be a trilogy. Shame really. The Hobbit should have been one film leading up to the main event of the three.

Tolkien was allergic to all things Celtic, claiming that he and his Saxon ancestry found it unappealing. Though he did borrow many words from Irish including Naisc(ring) for the Nazgul.

This really could have been at most two movies. In the next, the desolation of Smaug, I don't really know what they'll show at all as most of that part of the book is the company making It to laketown and sitting outside the mountain on the secret doorstep while bilbo sneaks into the mountain & converses wih the dragon.

Presumably film three will be the battle of the five armies. We won't see that til summer of 2014.

Clearly needed to be included. That scene was in no way the kind of thing that could be saved for the director's cut box set. It was masterful. Visual poetry.

corduroy_blazer wrote:

Is this movie better or worse than Shrek?

Well, the donkey wouldn't have been wholly out of place. But then neither would Jack Sparrow. They could hop on the rabbit sleigh with what I'm pretty sure was the Monty Python "it's" guy and all eat bugs and save hedgehogs together.

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See, to me, that's what I think TH should have been: a smaller, more humble film with some Celtic flavour and a few bumbling hobbits.

It could definitely have had a charm, under less ambitious circumstances, that the creators have attempted to trade in for "epic." And it can never be particularly epic, because the underlying story and characters are not built for it.

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if i show up thirty minutes late, will i miss anything important?

As much as it might have helped the story to get things moving a little faster, Martin Freeman's take on Bilbo is a lot of what saves it from being absolutely horrendous, and if you skip the first chunk you'll lose a lot of that.

Gandalf, aside from being a little less serious than in LotR and just as taken to disappearing when he's needed most, is pretty much cut down to being the guy who says "run" a lot and serves as a marker so you can find your band of scurrying heroes in the wide shots. And Richard Armitage's entire performance is this:

Just that.

I assume the entire direction he was given was "look just slightly off camera whenever possible, with a sort of brooding sulkiness. We'll fill in the rest."

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This really could have been at most two movies. In the next, the desolation of Smaug

Definitely. At the end of the day, there was just no reason for them to look at the Hobbit and go "Well, this looks every bit as big and expansive as Lord of the Rings."

Thorin was overplayed and overwrought in every way imaginable. He was the only character fail for me. I get that he has an axe to grind but Armitage it seems only read the cliff notes. He didn't seem to understand the character at all. Plus he was miscast. Thorn should be a lot older(looking) at least.

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